How to be Successful with Microsoft Teams
Russ Basiura
![Russ Basiura]()
Russ Basiura
Turning Executives into Microsoft Teams Champions that Drive Adoption into Business Outcomes??Power Platform?? ? Increased Productivity ? Improved Collaboration ? Faster Innovation ? Speaker
- Get Executive Sponsorship and Engagement - Establish a steering committee that meets once a month. The members are key stakeholders from each area of the business, Director level or above. Use this committee to establish a pipeline of projects required to drive the business forward and set priorities. They can also serve as a governance committee to set guidelines and make decisions for how your company will use Microsoft Teams. This is not technical. These guys set the vision for the modern workplace at your company.
- Have a Clear Vision, Roadmap and Business Goals - Companies need a well thought out vision and plan to keep the entire team rowing in the right direction. It doesn’t need to be a “fancy Gantt chart” but it does need to include a prioritized list of initiatives (deliverables), basic tasks, timelines and dependencies between tasks. Be flexible for adjustments but manage to the plan to keep everyone on course. Your plan should be used to set expectations with the leadership team, estimate ROI and prioritize each initiative. This will make sure your compass is always headed North towards your goals.
- Don’t try to boil the ocean. Identify the low hanging fruit for your organization that has mass appeal. Focus on functionality that applies to 80% of the users. I usually say focus on 20% of the functionality necessary for 80% of the users. This delivers value and answers the WIIFM question.
- Get your team engaged as users! Don’t try to make everyone a Teams administrator. Your users have real jobs like revenue generation to drive the business. They need enough training to upload files, run meetings/calls, and start chat sessions. Focus on the functionality that enables them be more effective in their jobs. Day one that don’t need to be administrators. Administrative tasks are your job initially. Over time the sophistication level of your Teams users will grow but it takes time to evolve. As they become more knowledgeable, you can move from a centralized administration model to a decentralized administration model that puts more of that functionality in the hands of your power users but you don’t need to start there day one. Your mileage here may vary if your user base is more technically astute. They key is to rollout a a level of functionality that meets their needs without overwhelming new users and turning them off. Every organization will have a Teams Maturity Model similar to Microsoft SharePoint
- Microsoft Teams is a huge transformational change to the way your users work. Training your end users on this new way to work is critical for success. Start doing weekly lunch and learns (via Teams) that anyone inside your company can join. Use the video conference to build enthusiasm and reinforce basic concepts with end users. Call it something like “30 in 30” and hold it at 1230. Users can watch and listen for 30 minutes while eating their lunch. Make sure each presentation answers WIFFM. Use these sessions as the basis of your enterprise training plan for Microsoft Teams. Users won’t use what they don’t understand or what they haven’t been trained on. Success with Teams requires providing a basic training level training to get users comfortable using it. Don’t throw them out on an island and tell them to go use the tool. The meetings can be recorded and re-played at 12:30 in other time zones. Create an archive of these sessions and use the archive to train new employees.
- Start driving user adoption of Microsoft Teams by addressing the users question “Whats In It For Me?” Companies that don’t answer this question see lower adoption rates. Daily notifications that are RELEVANT to the mass of users need to be going out to start pulling them into Microsoft Teams. Daily Teams tip, Did You Know?, Business specific news items, etc. Use these notifications to pull users into Microsoft Teams. Start using these tips as way to train your users on Teams functionality. One of the first tips could be how to download the Teams Mobile App. The end users need to see the messaging 7-8 times before it sinks in so reinforce the messaging with repetition. Microsoft has also provided the new Teams Adoption Hub to simplify the adoption process. The Teams Adoption Hub is designed to accelerate adoption by providing downloadable tools like quick learning sheets for end users and videos to help prepare helpdesk support. The Microsoft Teams Adoption Hub is part of the larger Teams adoption tools called Success with Teams that includes a Teams Adoption Guide and Customer Success kit with Quickstart guides, templates, posters and getting started guides.
Turning Executives into Microsoft Teams Champions that Drive Adoption into Business Outcomes??Power Platform?? ? Increased Productivity ? Improved Collaboration ? Faster Innovation ? Speaker
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